A pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own ... Bechdel's rich language and precise images combine to create a lush piece of work — a memoir where concision and detail are melded for maximum, obsessive density ... Fun Home is at its heart a story about a daughter trying to understand her father through the common and unspoken bond of their homosexuality.
Bechdel's graphic memoir is a witty, melancholic and endearing insight into grief, sexuality and a search for happiness ... Despite their particularity, Bechdel's struggles have a resonance for anyone dealing with family life, which makes Fun Home both comforting and startling in its honesty ... Bechdel's coming-of-age in both an artistic and a sexual sense is closely personal and as a reader I feel almost privileged to be privy to her tale. At the same time, the heartrending humanity of the novel is a comforting reminder that life is horrible, hard but often beautiful.
Grabs you from the first page and never lets go ... The book's meshing of text and art is so smooth and organic you don't even notice it unless you notice how well it's done ... Layering her family's tale with shades of Proust, Camus and Icarus, Bechdel gives her story depth while avoiding pretentiousness.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic explores the absurdities of Alison Bechdel's upbringing while simultaneously delivering them as exquisite truths, filling its pages with psychological insight and clever literary allusion ... Fun Home switches tone elegantly and yet swiftly, the comical and the dramatic yielding a solid realism ... Less impressive is the art, which is not bad, but the writing often overshadows it in quality and function ... It comes to us as a gift from some alternate universe where comics casually stand beside classic works of literature, reaching across the mediums without fear of mockery.
Bechdel's talent for intimacy and banter gains gravitas when used to describe a family in which a man's secrets make his wife a tired husk and overshadow his daughter's burgeoning womanhood and homosexuality ... The recursively told story, which revisits the sites of tragic desperation again and again, hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best ... She's made a story that's quiet, dignified and not easy to put down.
Bechdel’s memoir offers a graphic narrative of uncommon richness, depth, literary resonance and psychological complexity ... Rather than proceeding in chronological fashion, the memoir keeps circling back to this central relationship and familial tragedy, an obsession that the artist can never quite resolve or shake. The results are painfully honest, occasionally funny and penetratingly insightful.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
